Blogs from Semporna, Sabah, Malaysia, Asia - page 6

Right ok, so it's been a while (or it feels like it) since i last made one of these posts. In all truth i don't know if it will make alot of sense and maybe a little bit all over the place but here goes! I am currently sat in Semporna, a small little fishing + Scuba village on the east coast of Sabah (Boreo). Katie has gone out to do some snorkeling and i have some time to kill before i start my PADI Open Water Course. As far as i recall (I haven't checked) the last post i made was leaving India, well since then we have been to Singapore for a few days. I have to say i really liked Singapore, first impressions as they say are important and Singapore defiantly delivered well. ... read more

We arrived into Semporna at 4am and, unwilling to pay for a nights accomodation for just a few hours sleep, we ended up spending our first night in town on a pier! Thankfully at 7am we were able to check into our hotel of choice and settled down for a few more hours sleep in the 'Floating Inn'. It was a really lovely hotel and so called because it is built out on stilts over the water- you can see the waves rippling beneath you through the wooden floor boards in the dorm room! Semporna turned out to be a horrible little town and we were surprised at how dismal it was, considering the large numbers of tourists that visit there. It had a small selection of mediocre restaurants, a huge market, one very good pub, ... read more

After leaving Uncle Tan's we headed for Semporna (Waddya wanna watch? I wanna Semporna!). The sole purpose for going there was for some of us to have a go at diving but when we got there we fund that there was also a regatta on that weekend. The harbour was full of decorated sea gypsy boats and there were stalls and plenty of people. One young boy took a shining to Mam and walked around the market with us, getting hold of her hand before waving to any of his friends. There were lots of children around, many of them probably homeless orphans who have ended up here as illegal immigrants from nearby Indonesia and Phillipines. For anyone out there thinking of setting up an orphanage or school somewhere in the world, Semporna would be ... read more

It seems it has become a habit for us to write a blog every week. Hopefully we will pull ourselves together and be as persisten as we were the first few weeks. Not that has happened since our last entry though. Our third day in Brunei was very relaxed. Breakfast was finished at 1 o'clock and we spent some time with the computers. At three we finally went to see the famous Omar 'Ali Saifuddien Mosque. Our expectations were way too high, partly because of the overly positive review in our guide book. Just like our luck with historic buildings this one was also under renovation. Big scaffolds covered the entire dome. The inside felt quite a bit superficial, partly because of the puny escalator leading up to God knows where. We then went to a ... read more

Hi all, I'm currently in Semporna, which is a small town in Sabah in Borneo people visit to dive off Sipadan - which is widely considered one of the best, if not the best dive site in the world. I came out here to do a PADI (the worldwide recognised diving certification) Open Water course, which is the basic qualification needed to dive anywhere. I got here last Tuesday evening and was picked up by the driver for the company I've been diving with. It was a 1 - 1 1/2 hour drive I wont forget, going up to 180 kph along winding, hilly pitch black roads! The general strategy seemed to be to straddle the white lines in the middle of the road and use them as a guide, If something came around a bend ... read more